Piatt's 'Mock Diamonds': Memory, Deception, and the Old South

Critical Difficulty and Temporal Structure. “Mock Diamonds” is among Piatt’s most difficult poems. However, students tackling its complex literary puzzles will be well repaid for their effort. One reason for the poem’s difficulty is its weaving together of past and present using multiple speakers and multiple time frames. The shift in time frames is analogous to what happens in a movie flashback. Students may find it useful, therefore, to ponder the role that the latter plays in contemporary filmmaking since this technique formally embodies one of the poem’s principal themes—the continuance of the past in the present.

Setting and Conversational Cues. “Mock Diamonds” is set at a seaside resort, the same one where the speaker (now a wife and mother) vacationed as a young woman. She has returned in order to introduce her husband (a Northerner) to the world of the antebellum Southern aristocracy where she was born. One must follow the flow of their conversation in the first four stanzas carefully if the rest of the poem is to make sense.

To a question someone else (her husband) has asked—“The handsome man there with the scar? / (Who bow’d to me?)”—she answers, “Yes, slightly.” From this we can surmise that her husband wanted to know whether or not she knew this man. When she answers, “slightly,” he is satisfied and moves on to another prospect, cutting her off midsentence (line 7). He is looking for a particular person: as we will soon learn, his wife’s former lover.

Jealousy, Southern Stereotypes, and Flashback. There is a teasing quality to Piatt’s writing in the next two stanzas that makes the husband’s jealousy-motivated description of the second man faintly ridiculous. He has a “low Southern swagger” and looks as if he belongs to the Ku Klux Klan (vividly described as a “doubtful chivalry” that holds “midnight-vengeance meetings”). The wife denies this but says the man was among those who surrendered “late”—after the war’s official end—for which some have judged him harshly. Although the husband does not know it yet, he has found his man, and the speaker, using flashback, recalls for him what her relationship to this man was and how it abruptly ended when, at her mother’s urging, he left in pursuit of an “heiress” instead.

Deconstruction of the Old South. At this point, the poem turns from a mocking consideration of the sex game, Southern-style, into something darker: a deconstruction of the Old South. Refusing to romanticize either her own past or that of the Old South, Piatt rewrites the “lost cause” as “insolent false glory” and rewrites Southern planter society as a victim of its own delusions. The Southern chevalier (the speaker’s erstwhile lover) and the Southern belle whose “diamonds flash’d him blind” both turn out to be frauds by poem’s end. As the speaker says self-mockingly in stanza 10, her husband has nothing to worry about: “Your bright child’s fading mother / And that guerrilla from—the dead? / Are nothing to each other. / The past is dead.”

The Return of the Past. Or is it? Rising from the sand, the man stands before her, and “all the dim sea grew dimmer,” his presence blocking out all else: As if picking up where they left off decades before, he makes a single remark. When she tells us that men “never” hear such bitter laughter from other men, she implies his style with her is the intimate style that arises only between lovers, present or past.

The speaker assured her husband that, like the Old South, her own romantic past is dead, but this ending suggests otherwise. When in the last lines, the “guerrilla from—the dead” reveals the truth—that like the chevalier himself, the belle, too, was a fraud—the final piece of the puzzle falls into place. The past, the speaker asserts, has now truly “Pas’d to the past forever,” but we are left to wonder whether or not it ever really can.

For Discussion or Writing.
1. Look up the word mock and use its definitions to help you analyze the poem. Find examples in the poem of specific words, phrases, or events that rely on either sense of the word. For example, what does “doubtful chivalry” mean? What is the effect of including these words?

2. This poem is in part about the relation between the present and the past. Identify elements of the present scene that the poem juxtaposes with what happened long ago and explain their significance.

3. Why does she call her former lover a “hero”? Was he? What evidence in the poem enables you to judge the tone here?

4. Does Piatt’s staging of the Old South as a grand confidence game in which each person is out to defraud the other shed light on Mark Twain’s (Samuel Langhorne Clemens’s) use of two confidence men, the Dauphin and the Duke, in Huckleberry Finn? Why might these two writers, both of whom grew up in the South but eventually moved to the North, have found the idea of a confidence game an apt metaphor for the antebellum South?

5. Piatt clearly has the Ku Klux Klan in mind in stanza 3 of “Mock Diamonds.” Read about Klan activities in the South in the Reconstruction period. What language in the poem suggests that she is talking about the Klan? Is there any connection between what the Old South was and the rise of the Klan after the war?

Dual Interpretations in Sarah Piatt’s "The Funeral of a Doll" (1872)

Dual Readings and Sentimental Conventions. Published in 1872, "The Funeral of a Doll" by Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt presents a dual-layered structure that can be interpreted in two contrasting yet deeply interconnected ways: one sentimental, the other highly ironic. Approached through a purely sentimental lens, the poem depicts a young girl's mourning over the "death" of her plaything. Within 19th-century Victorian literature, sentimental depictions of childhood bereavement enjoyed vast popularity, drawing emotional reactions from readers accustomed to mourning tropes. Viewed in this framework, the doll's "death" functions as a direct parallel to the death of "Little Nell," the heroine of Charles Dickens’s celebrated novel The Old Curiosity Shop (1840). According to this conventional reading, the young girl's tears replicate the sentimental grief that Victorian audiences regularly expressed when consuming popular literature.

Maternal Ambivalence and Subversive Description. The perspective of the poem's speaker—the young girl's mother—introduces a significantly more complex narrative dynamic. While functioning as the storyteller who observes the ritual, the mother's delivery reveals underlying, darker interpretive possibilities that distance her from her daughter's performance. For example, when describing the doll named Little Nell as "slight and still and mild, / Blue-eyed and sweet; she always smiled," the attribution of living traits to inanimate materials—a wax head stuffed with straw—renders the object eerie and unnatural rather than endearingly human. Furthermore, when the speaker adds, "and never troubled any one / Until her pretty life was done," the tone shifts ambiguity between sincere praise and subtle mockery, suggesting the characterization is simply too perfect to be true.

Ironic Stance and Punctuation Cues. The mother adopts a similarly edgy stance toward the funeral ceremony itself. Calling the doll inside its paper coffin "A very fair and piteous sight," she appends the phrase, "Enough to make one sorry, quite". The word quite functions dismissively, implying a lack of genuine sympathy. However, a subtle shift occurs in stanza 3 through a broken-off thought marked by a dash. After stating "But," she adds "no matter"—a phrase whose dramatic cutoff indicates the closing of the doll's coffin triggers a repressed, painful memory of real loss.

The Limits of Consolation and Unanswered Questions. This emotional tension helps clarify the speaker's complex tone. While caring for her daughter, the mother recognizes that both the object of grief (a toy) and the child's exaggerated sorrow are performed rituals—a mimed "story each had learned to tell". In contrast, the mother understands actual mortality. A key structural cue appears when the daughter asks, "Where is she now?"—a question set notably in italics that the mother leaves unanswered. A traditional 19th-century sentimentalist would offer reassurances of a heavenly afterlife, yielding a comforting resolution. Uncertain of divine consolation herself, the speaker cannot extend such promises, leaving her to silently watch her child grieve.

Academic Discussion and Pedagogical Directives. The original source material presents five thematic prompts for academic analysis, comparative literature research, and critical writing:
1st question: Compare and contrast Piatt’s depiction of "Little Nell" as a living-dead doll with Sylvia Plath’s exploration of the "living doll" motif in "The Applicant".

2nd question: Analyze Little Eva’s death in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Chapter 26) alongside Piatt’s poem, evaluating whether Piatt offers a broader critique of Victorian child death scenes in Dickens and Stowe.

3rd question: Examine the implied answer to the child’s question in the penultimate line ("Where is she now?"), discussing why the speaker withhold an explicit response and how this silence shapes the poem's meaning.

4th question: Analyze the structural function of the dash in stanza 3, exploring what unspoken thoughts the speaker suppresses and how this missing context informs her characterization.

5th question: Evaluate how the doll in Piatt's poem occupies an uncanny space between the human and the inhuman, comparing this dynamic to modern horror films centered on living dolls.